Rescue At Cedar Lake. Maggie Black K.
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you apparently do. Certainly, I never meant to hurt you. But right now, our past doesn’t matter.”
She could tell he was upset, but she didn’t know why. Did it bother him to be reminded that he was the one who’d broken off their engagement? Either way he was completely failing to get what she was saying. Like when he’d seemed to think “I don’t know if I can marry you right now” had meant “Please go away forever. I don’t love you anymore.”
“Listen,” she said. “Please. What I’m saying is that it was very bizarre and specific. Added to the fact he seemed convinced I knew something about this trunk, which I don’t, it makes me think that maybe he had some kind of deeper link to our history here.”
“Maybe? I don’t know. It sounds like a pretty big leap of logic to me.” He didn’t look convinced. “But we can talk about it more when I’ve located Zoe and Mandy, we’re somewhere safe, we’re not trying to outrun a pending storm and nobody’s shooting at us. Just give me half a second and then we’ll keep going. Won’t be long.”
He turned away. She nearly groaned. The storm was growing worse by the second. His sister and Mandy were missing. She’d just been kidnapped and shot at. A man was dead. Yet here they were, reliving the very same kind of argument they’d had a hundred times before. He wanted to leap into action. She wanted to pause long enough to actually think.
Alex had already given up on the cell phone and was fiddling with the radio. She glanced at the cottage. The families at Cedar Lake used to have an open-door policy for all the kids on the lake in case of emergency. Maybe she could still find a key. Her hand ran along the underside of the window boxes, feeling in the snow. Then she stopped short. The cottage door was already ajar.
“Hey, Alex? I think the cottage is open.”
No response. She pressed her hand against the door. It swung open under her touch.
She stepped inside the cottage and cried out in shock.
It had been ransacked.
* * *
Theresa’s cry was faint and yet to Alex’s ears it seemed to rise above the sound of the wind and the static hissing in his ear.
“Theresa?” He turned back. For a moment he couldn’t see her, just snow swirling around the empty place he’d left her standing just moments ago. He ran back three strides and burst through the open door. The cottage had been turned inside out. Drawers hung open. Furniture was tossed. They’d theorized the carnage at the Rhodeses’ cottage had had something to do with Josh’s second cousins and maybe something expensive one of them owned. But why ransack a neighboring cottage? Theresa stood in the clutter. Her hand rose to her lips.
“The poor Pattersons,” she said.
He slid his helmet off. Theresa still had her back to him. His hand reached up instinctively to slide around her shoulder. At the last moment, he caught himself and brought his hand back down, just before his fingertips brushed the back of her neck. He set the helmet down and slid his hands into his pockets.
“We knew Castor and his buddies were looking for a trunk,” he said. “Maybe they’re going door to door looking for it.”
“Mandy’s brothers have done well for themselves financially, and Castor mentioned her by name. So I could at least come up with some theories why somebody would rob them. But the Pattersons are just a really nice, low-key, modest family who never did anything to anyone...” Then she turned back suddenly and he could see the same question crossing her mind that had just crossed his.
“Except for Corey,” he finished.
Corey Patterson was four years younger than Alex and had gotten in trouble with the law for drug possession at sixteen. Alex wasn’t sure of all the details. But sometime around the time they’d been getting engaged, Josh’s dad, who was a cop, had smelled marijuana on Corey and threatened to turn him in. Rumor had it that Corey had been in trouble with the law off and on after that. Then, around the time their engagement had ended, Corey had been charged with possession.
“Whatever happened to him?” Theresa leaned against the wall.
“I honestly don’t know,” Alex said. “I kind of checked out of what was going on up here after you and I broke up. Last I heard, he’d been sent to a youth rehabilitation facility. All my mom would say is that every family had their problems. I just can’t imagine anyone doing this to their own grandparents. I hate to say this, but if they’re ransacking small cottages then they probably hit your family’s cottage, too.”
“My family doesn’t have a cottage here anymore. I thought you knew that.” She crossed over to where a jumble of smashed pictures in frames littered the floor. “They sold it years ago to pay off their business debts.”
She said it so calmly. Like she was pointing out the color of the sky or the existence of dirt on the ground. Like it was a given and he should know. But he hadn’t. And that irked him.
“No, I didn’t know,” he said. He watched as she bent down and carefully brushed the glass out of a broken frame. “I had absolutely no idea. How’s the business doing now?”
“It’s gone, too. They sold it at a loss.” Now there really was a hint of reproach in her voice. “A long time ago. Remember there was a big fire shortly after we got engaged? Well, when they lost the battle with the insurance company they were forced to sell the business, the cottage, our house—all of it—to settle their debts.”
What? His mind spun. His sister, his family and Josh all had to have known about this. Had he been so determined to shut down any conversation about Theresa that they’d never brought it up with him? Or, worse, had they presumed he’d already known?
“There was a huge auction.” She stood up slowly, the picture still in her fingers. “You must know this.”
“Well, I honestly didn’t.” Heat rose to the back of his neck. His voice sounded louder than he’d meant it to. While he’d been on the video call with Theresa he’d wondered why Zoe hadn’t relocated them to the Vaughans’ cottage at the mouth of the lake. He’d never imagined the Vaughans no longer owned it. “When exactly was all this?”
“The end of the summer we were supposed to get married. I told you, my parents were having problems—”
“Money problems. Not ‘losing everything’ problems—”
The lines around her mouth set hard, like she was biting something back.
“Well, at the time we broke up it wasn’t public knowledge,” she said. “They put the cottage up for sale at the end of that summer and held an auction for the furniture and the stock left in the store that the creditors didn’t take back. Don Patterson took over the lease of the actual store building for his business. But sadly it wasn’t enough to keep them from losing the house. The whole thing was a slow, painful death that took a very long time.”
He ran his hand slowly over his jaw. “I’m sorry.”
The words seemed so inadequate, but he didn’t know what else to say.
“Thanks. It was a long time ago. Now, can you do me a favor and take a cell phone picture of this?” She bent down and picked up a glossy photograph in a broken frame, changing the topic before he could press any further. “It would feel wrong to take it with me, but I think it might be helpful to have while we’re trying to figure out what’s happening here.”
She held it up and for the first time he saw what she’d rescued from the glass. It was a group picture of the Cedar Lake barbecue, taken the summer he was twenty. Almost fifty people between the ages of two and eighty clustered around the warm rocks that jutted out into the lake in front of the Vaughan’s family cottage. Half of them were kids or teens, many of whom had been his friends. He was sitting off to the side in a huge wooden Adirondack chair. He, Theresa, Zoe and Josh had won the Cedar Lake scavenger hunt for the very first time that year, beating out the stronger group of Emmett, Kyle and